There are 25 contested primaries in Illinois' 18 congressional districts, the first elections under newly drawn district boundaries. As a result of the decennial redistricting process, many people will be choosing among candidates they know little about. Many of the districts are huge, extending across the circulation areas of multiple newspapers and even different television markets. At a time when traditional news organizations are shrinking, it can't be good for democracy that it could take a reporter most of a day to travel from one end of a district to the other.

The mission of the Knight Lab, a joint program of Northwestern University's journalism and computer science programs, is to "accelerate media innovation" in the Chicago area. The primary elections initiative takes into account the new realities of media and politics today, including candidates' extensive use of social media and the fragmentation of the news audience.

The project's three main elements are:

• Candidate profiles from a social media perspective, including analysis of what the candidates tweet about and what their followers tweet about;
• An aggregation tool that collects coverage of individual congressional primary races from many sources;
• A simplified snapshot of campaign contributions that focuses on the geographical profile of each candidate's contributor base.

All of these components will go live on www.congressionalprimaries.org in early February. More importantly, they are being offered -- at no charge -- to web publishers large and small. The Lab's goal is to have the election coverage distributed through as many news outlets as possible.

News organizations can use the Lab's congressional coverage to serve their users, adding their own branding and navigation to pages hosted by the Lab. Or news organizations can use "widgets" that incorporate elements of the coverage into their websites. Either way, they get coverage of the campaigns that goes beyond what any one organization can provide itself.

The elections initiative incorporates technology approaches that my Northwestern computer science colleagues have specialized in for years: powerful web searching, content categorization and extraction of meaning from editorial content and social media. By making these technologies available to local news media in connection with an important news event, the Lab seeks to whet publishers' appetite for innovation and build their interest in collaborating with media they might also consider to be business competitors.

After the primary, the Lab's leadership team will review the results of the elections initiative and consider expanding on it for the November general election.

Details about the congressional primaries project are available in two PDF files on the Knight Lab website: a project overview and FAQ. The Lab is reaching out to potential partners throughout Illinois and adjacent media markets to explain the project in greater detail. Potential partners can also contact r-graff@northwestern.edu to get a head start on customizing the services. 

These new "watchdog" organizations have produced some distinguished journalism -- ProPublica, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting earlier this year. But three separate research reports, released in the past two months, make clear that great journalism isn't going to be enough to keep most of them alive -- neither are the foundation grants and large individual donations that got them off the ground.

Non-profit news organizations will survive only if they find and build a community: Identify people who believe in their mission, engage them online and in person, and make them want to provide financial support.

This is not a new model. It's pretty much the same thing that public television and public radio have done for decades. But the recent research reports suggest that most of the new non-profit news startups have made only a little progress in this area.

"Getting Local: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability" was a report published last month by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It provides a detailed review of seven non-profit news sites and suggests several key ingredients for success:

• A business development strategy and the capacity to execute it
• A high level of audience focus and efforts to build community engagement
• Technological capacity to support and track engagement

A second report -- "Online Journalism Enterprises: From Startup to Sustainability" -- comes from the Renaissance Journalism Center at San Francisco State University. Based on a survey of 32 online journalism startups, the authors conclude:

Grants are getting harder to come by for existing sites. Two-thirds of the study respondents said they are at or approaching a crossroad where it is getting difficult to secure a second or third round of grants or financing.

The third report -- "Nonprofit Watchdog News: What's Working?" was published earlier this month by a team of journalism master's students from the Medill School at Northwestern University. The students are enrolled in Medill's Community Media Innovation Project, for which I'm the lead instructor.

The students identified eight “lessons from non-profit watchdogs” that other sites might emulate to maximize their impact and sustainability. Several of the key lessons relate to building a community and generating financial support from individuals:

• Build audience connections and revenue through in-person events
• Reach out to readers for story ideas and content
• Diversify revenue sources, with a focus on small donors

DIVERSIFYING REVENUE
Most of the sites described in these reports were able to launch thanks to grants from foundations or donations from a few generous philanthropists. But only a few of them have made substantial strides toward diversifying their revenue sources.

Two organizations that have made significant progress toward financial sustainability are MinnPost and the St. Louis Beacon. These sites have differentiated themselves from other non-profit startups by focusing from the beginning on building a diverse set of revenue streams.

Joel Kramer, founder and CEO of MinnPost, told The New York Times last year that he wanted MinnPost to be financially self-supporting by 2012. "I have a very aggressive definition of sustainability, which is that we have enough revenues to survive without foundation money,” he told the Times.

MinnPost brought in more money than it spent in 2010, and relied on foundations for just 36 percent of its $1.28 million in revenues, according to the Knight report. Almost 40 percent of its revenues came from individual donations or ticket sales for its annual MinnRoast event. As of March 2011, MinnPost had 2,400 paying members, the Knight report said.

Like MinnPost, the Beacon has built in-person engagement through events, including community conversations about race and monthly "Beacon & Eggs" breakfast panel discussions. Almost 60 percent of its $2.2 million in revenue in 2010 came from individual donations, the Knight report said. On the Beacon's website, the organization emphasizes its growing community of contributors by highlighting individual donors on every page with messages like "Charlie backs the Beacon." There's even a separate "I Back the Beacon" page with profiles of individual donors.

There's no guarantee that any of the new non-profit news organizations will survive. But MinnPost and the St. Louis Beacon seem to be pointing in the right direction.

Today, the idea that journalism needs more software developers is mainstream. And that's why Medill and the Knight Foundation are announcing an extension of the scholarship program.

The three-year, $250,000 grant will enable Medill to provide scholarships to at least six more people with computer programming experience. The new grant supplements the original $639,000 grant, which has allowed nine computer programmers to earn journalism master's degrees since 2008.

What the first nine scholarship winners are doing now:

• Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark are key members of the Chicago Tribune's news applications team, which has earned a national reputation for developing and deploying new technologies that inform and engage online users.
• Manya Gupta is a web journalist for The World, a public radio program focusing on "global perspectives for an American audience."
• Shane Shifflett is a news apps developer for the Bay Citizen in San Francisco.
• Nick Allen and Andrew Paley work for Narrative Science, a startup company whose software constructs stories from data such as baseball box scores and economic trends.
• Geoff Hing is an independent software developer working on a variety of civic and social projects in Chicago.
• Jesse Young is a software engineer at Federated Media Publishing.
• Steven Melendez is working as a reporter for the BVI Beacon, a newspaper in the British Virgin Islands.

A lot has happened since the first round of scholarship funding was announced. Just a few months earlier, Mark Glaser had written on PBS Mediashift about a few newspapers that had hired computer programmers for newsroom positions.

Now there's a widely shared spreadsheet listing more than 40 jobs for "news developers." And Hacks/Hackers chapters -- devoted to meetups between journalists and technologists -- operating in almost 30 cities.

This past February in Raleigh, N.C., the Computer Assisted Reporting conference -- which in previous years mostly dealt with computer software as analytical tools -- featured numerous sessions on applying computer programming to mapping, data visualization and news applications. And the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns the company producing the Firefox browser, has launched a partnership with the Knight Foundation to "invent the future of news."

WHY TURN PROGRAMMERS INTO JOURNALISTS?
The premise of the Medill scholarship program is that software developers with an education in journalism can be more productive and successful in news organizations than those who enter the field without a journalism degree.

Under the new grant, scholarship winners will be encouraged to develop a curriculum tailored to their interests, meeting the requirements of Medill's MSJ degree while also having the option of incorporating advanced course work in computer science.

Medill plans to build partnerships with media companies that are interested in hiring journalists with computer programming expertise. Media partners will be asked to provide financial aid to supplement Knight's scholarship funding, and also offer paid internships for the scholarship winners.

Scholarship winners will also have the opportunity to work in the Knight News Innovation Laboratory and Medill's new Watchdog/Accountability Initiative. The Knight Lab, a joint project of Northwestern's journalism and engineering schools, is developing innovative technologies to be used by journalists and publishers in Chicago and beyond. The Watchdog/Accountability Initiative specializes in investigative reporting on systemic flaws in government and public institutions.

Scholarship recipients must meet Medill’s normal admissions requirements. They will complete the same core academic program as other MSJ students. The first academic quarter is spent learning reporting and storytelling skills in multiple media. At least one other quarter is spent in Medill’s Chicago newsroom, covering a beat and creating multimedia stories.

More information about the scholarship program can be found on the Medill website.

Image courtesy of Flickr user skyfaller.]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/11/knight-foundation-extends-medill-journalism-scholarships-for-programmers313.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/11/knight-foundation-extends-medill-journalism-scholarships-for-programmers313.html EducationTechnology computer programminggranthacker journalistsknight foundationmedill schoolscholarshipstechnology Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:20:11 -0500 richgor@northwestern.edu (Rich Gordon) The Knight News Innovation Laboratory at Northwestern University is seeking a director of software engineering and several developers interested in working on software that improves the quality, accessibility or distribution of local news and information.

The Knight Lab, supported by a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is a joint program of the journalism and engineering schools at Northwestern. It will develop, deploy and test software that fulfills the Lab's mission of "accelerating media innovation" in the Chicago region.

The Knight Lab will partner with media organizations ranging from large commercial media companies to non-profit organizations that serve niche audiences. The Lab will explore projects that:

• enable journalists to do a better job of reporting;
• help news/information consumers find content that is relevant or important to them;
• improve the way news and information is presented, organized or visualized;
• build audience engagement with local news and information.

"Our software engineering team will be working on diverse, exciting projects that get used by real people in the Chicago area," said Michael A. Silver, the Lab's executive director. "It's a great opportunity for developers who are interested in working on software that has an impact and improves the way people find and use news and information."

Silver is a former newspaper and television journalist who spent more than 25 years at the Tribune Co. in various executive positions related to the development, marketing and management of interactive information services. He started work as the Lab's first executive director in July.

Looking for a 'Player-Coach'

For the software engineering director position, the ideal candidate is a "player-coach" who has up-to-date software development skills as well as project-management experience, strong leadership skills, and familiarity with online publishing and social media. The Lab expects to work with a variety of programming languages (such as Python, PHP and SQL), frameworks (Django or Ruby on Rails), and platforms (PCs, tablets and mobile devices). At least one member of the development team should have expertise in front-end web and mobile design.

A top priority in the Lab's earliest work will be to evaluate open-source software already developed through the Knight News Challenge and other grantees from Knight Foundation's $100 million media innovation initiative. The Knight Lab will review the News Challenge software and identify projects with the greatest value for local publishers and media users. It will adapt, improve and develop the technology to better meet audience and market needs. The lab will also work on technologies originally developed at Northwestern and elsewhere.

The Knight Lab is part of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism. It is overseen by a management committee consisting of me and Owen Youngman from the Medill School, and Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum of the electrical engineering and computer science department of the McCormick School of Engineering.

A more complete description of the jobs can be found below. If you are interested in any of the positions, email a cover letter and resume to knightlab@northwestern.edu.

The lab, supported by a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is part of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism. When the grant was announced last month, Eric Newton, vice president of Knight's journalism programs, described it as a "pioneering partnership between a school of journalism and a school of engineering."

The executive director will oversee the Lab's operations and staff -- which will include at least three full-time software developers and a marketing/outreach coordinator -- and will work closely with Northwestern faculty and students. He or she will report to the Center's management committee, which consists of me and Owen Youngman from the Medill School of Journalism, and Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum of the electrical engineering and computer science department of the McCormick School of Engineering.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to help drive media innovation in local communities, who understands media technologies and has a track record of successfully managing interdisciplinary teams and projects.

The Knight Lab will partner with media organizations in the Chicago area to test, deploy and refine technologies that can be valuable to local publishers -- from large commercial media companies to nonprofit organizations that serve niche audiences. A top priority in the Lab's earliest work will be to evaluate open-source software already developed through the Knight News Challenge and other grantees from Knight Foundation's $100 million media innovation initiative.

The Knight Lab will review the News Challenge software and identify projects with the greatest value for local publishers and media users. It will adapt, improve and develop the technology to better meet audience and market needs, working with partners to deploy it and measure results. The lab will also work on technologies originally developed at Northwestern and elsewhere.

Those interested in the job can apply through Northwestern's jobs portal at http://www.northwestern.edu/hr/jobs.

UPDATE: The Northwestern University job-application system is unavailable until March 14 due to a system upgrade.  The full job description is provided below.

If you wish to apply for the job (as of March 14 or later), browse to http://www.northwestern.edu/hr/jobs and:

• Click on "Academic/Administrative Jobs."
• Select "An external applicant"
• Enter "Knight Lab" in the search box.

At the same time, though, the web can be overwhelming. Hundreds of links turn up in a Google search. Relevant information can be scattered across dozens of sites. Online conversations often generate more heat than light. And if you have a question about a news topic, it's hard to find the answer.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a website that made it easier to keep up with and understand the news?

Soon, there could be. Let me introduce you to Sourcerer, a website prototype developed this fall by a team of graduate journalism students, including five Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners.

Sourcerer is a "context management system" designed to help people learn more about a topic by asking questions, answering them, backing up those answers with links, and navigating through previous coverage via a timeline.

Sourcerer emerged out of Medill's Community Media Innovation Project class, which studied the news and information needs of local audiences and the challenges facing online publishers who want to serve them.

Problems

Two of the key problems identified by the students:

• People who don't follow every twist and turn in an ongoing story -- especially one that has deep historical context, such as the achievement gap between white and minority students in public schools -- have difficulty understanding the context of that story. Others have noted this problem as well: Matt Thompson, now of NPR, has written and spoken eloquently about "how journalists might start winning at the context game."
• At the same time, in every community, there are knowledgeable citizens who dominate discussion boards and comment threads -- often mixing fact with opinion and intimidating those who want to learn more but are afraid of displaying their lack of understanding by asking questions. The Medill team wanted communities to benefit from the expertise of these knowledgeable citizens while creating an environment where discussion could be organized around facts, not just opinions.

Sourcerer seeks to serve people just trying to understand an issue as well as those who already have that understanding. It could be launched as part of an existing news site, or as a collaboration among multiple publishers covering a community or topic.

Key Features

While the site is not quite ready for a public rollout yet, let me walk you through Sourcerer's key features:

1) Topics

The Medill team concluded that Sourcerer should be organized around topics, rather than stories. Their first challenge was figuring out how to present a complex topic in a way that is not intimidating to someone who hasn't followed the story before. After testing several approaches with users, the students settled on short summaries of key elements, with bold-face highlights and links to external sites providing background.

2) Questions

The second key element of Sourcerer is an interface for people to ask questions about the topic. Like many question-and-answer sites, Sourcerer allows users to "upvote" questions they think are particularly good. Questions with the most votes appear at the top, and a Sourcerer site covering multiple topics would highlight the most popular questions.

3) Answers and clips

What differentiates Sourcerer from other Q&A sites is the fact that answers can be posted only if the answerer provides a link to source material backing up the answer. A key feature of the site is the News Clipper, which enables users to provide a link and also grab a key excerpt of the linked-to page for insertion into the answer on Sourcerer.

4) Voting and flagging

In addition to "upvoting" questions, Sourcerer users can also render their opinions about the answers. As with questions, users can register a "thumbs up" for answers they approve of. They can also flag answers as opinions rather than facts.

5) The timeline

One of the coolest features of Sourcerer is a timeline constructed out of the articles that are linked from the site. The timeline is built dynamically -- as answerers provide links to source material, the linked-to articles are added to the timeline.

The timeline displays the articles as a series of vertical bars. The higher the bar, the more popular the linked-to article. The timeline also shades the articles based on whether users deem them factual or opinion-based.

The timeline displays the articles in chronological order, left to right. Mousing over the timeline displays the article headline and summary. The beauty of this interface is that it provides an easy way to navigate chronologically through articles published about a particular topic -- even articles published on multiple external sites.

You can get a sense of how Sourcerer works by checking out a screencast prepared by Shane Shifflett of the Sourcerer development team. The other developers were Steven Melendez, Geoffrey Hing and Andrew Paley.

We're looking for sites -- and users -- interested in participating in a beta launch. If you're interested, go to Sourcerer.US and sign up.

If you want to know a lot more about Sourcerer, the class' final report provides much more detail about the site as well as the research that led to its development. The report includes a lot of good advice for hyperlocal publishers about audience research and revenue strategies. The class also produced a separate revenue "cookbook" for hyperlocal publishers.

You can see the students present Sourcerer and their other findings and recommendations here. For even more background and context, check out LocalFourth.com, the blog the students maintained during the class. The "Fourth" is a reference to the press -- the Fourth Estate.

At the Block By Block "community news summit" in September, operators of locally focused websites came together to share what they knew and learn from their peers. Almost all of them were looking for advice on how to support their sites financially.

Here's a start: "Sustaining Hyperlocal News: An Approach to Studying Local Business Markets," a new report from a team of master's students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The report is the first output -- with more to come -- from this term's "innovation project" class.

"To become financially sustainable, hyperlocal publishers need to make revenue a priority rather than an afterthought," the report says.

The report focuses mainly on approaches to generating online advertising revenue in local communities. It draws on interviews with site publishers as well as audience research and advertiser interviews conducted by the class in our "case study" community: Evanston, Illinois, Medill's hometown.

The starting point, the students contend, is "getting to know your audience ... really getting to know them." The report describes the audience research process undertaken by the class, with suggestions on how hyperlocal publishers can adapt and replicate this research.

Based on an analysis of local advertising in Evanston, the report also identifies business categories most likely to be interested in advertising locally: home furnishing, retail, banking, community organizations, restaurants and professional services. Beyond that, the students conclude that new and growing businesses have different advertising needs than "legacy businesses," which are well-established in their communities.

"Sustaining Hyperlocal News" was researched and written by the class business/revenue team, which was led by Frank Kalman and Jesse Young,one of five Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners enrolled in the class. You can read Frank's take on the report on the class blog, LocalFourth.com

The class will also produce a longer report addressing more of the challenges facing hyperlocal publishing on the web, as well as a website prototype demonstrating new forms of online interaction around local news.

For readers in the Chicago area, the class's final presentation next week is open to the public.  It's  scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 9, in the Forum (first floor auditorium) of the McCormick Tribune Center, 1870 Campus Drive, Evanston. RSVP here. If you can't attend the presentation, it will be live-streamed (and archived for later viewing) at bit.ly/CMIP2010.

The class is being supported by the Community News Matters grant program. Community News Matters is overseen by the Chicago Community Trust, which initiated the program as part of the Knight Community Information Challenge.

Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December. Here's the second of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans. Other profiles: Geoffrey Hing.

Jesse Young has worked for two Internet startups in the Bay Area, but he came to Medill in part because of his love for magazines -- the printed kind. He's particularly interested in the challenges of making magazines financially viable online.

In the Medill innovation project class he's currently enrolled in (along with the other four Knight scholars), Jesse is one of the leaders of the business team, which is identifying revenue strategies for hyperlocal publishers. He'd like to do the same for a magazine like Harper's.

"I'm interested in finding ways to help media get back to profitability," Jesse says. "Companies need to explore new digital revenue models that aren't just throwbacks to print."

While at Medill, Jesse reported on the telecom industry, writing about broadband technology, consumer protection and mobile applications.

He and some of his classmates also launched Flood Magazine, a Web site that garnered some attention earlier this month when Jesse showed how easy it was for a technically savvy non-subscriber to bypass the publication's "paywall" barrier.

Before coming to Medill, Jesse earned a degree in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California-Berkeley.  He has worked as a developer and software engineer for MOG and Howcast.

For more information about Jesse, check out his LinkedIn profile.

One of the first two Knight scholars wrote a guest post for Idea Lab suggesting eight different career paths for people who, as I like to put it, are bilingual in journalism and technology.

Five Knight scholars will graduate from Medill in December.  Here's the first of a series of posts describing them and their career goals and plans.

Geoffrey Hing's goal is to collaborate with people who aren't well-served by media or other information sources get the information they need to make important decisions, improve their lives or better understand their communities. He sees his future not exclusively as a journalist or a software developer but more as an information designer who helps solve problems by drawing on technology, community insight and knowledge, and the multidisciplinary skills of diverse collaborators.

"I am interested in using technology to try to meet the information needs of communities that aren't served or likely to be served by industry," he says.

Projects that have excited Geoff recently include Voces Móviles (Mobile Voices), which enables immigrant workers in Southern California to create and publish multimedia stories from their mobile phones, and Between the Bars, a project at MIT (written about recently on Idealab) that crowdsources the transcription of prisoner letters into blog posts. He is interested in exploring participatory design methods like the ones surveyed in a recent article from the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative.

In his time at Medill, Geoff wrote articles on housing issues such as eviction and affordable rental housing, the intersection of race and political power in Chicago, uses of social media for community empowerment and neighborhood conflict across race and age.

He missed doing programming work. "At Medill it was very frustrating not to do more technology development, especially when there were problems that could be solved with a little hacking," Geoff said.

Geoff has has a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from the Ohio State University. After graduating, he worked for an Internet service provider, the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project (which provides reading material to prison inmates), and the research technologies department at Indiana University.

Geoff has settled in Chicago and would prefer to stay here. His ideal job would be about one-third programming, one third management and strategy, and one third training or community organizing.

"I would love to be the go-to developer for community-centered media projects in Chicago, especially short-term, fast, agile ones," Geoff says.

You can learn more about Geoff on his Web site, The Reality Tunnel.

]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/11/graduating-programmer-journalist-wants-to-help-underserved-communities323.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/11/graduating-programmer-journalist-wants-to-help-underserved-communities323.html EducationParticipationTechnology geoffrey hingknight news challengemedillnorthwestern universityprogrammer-journalist Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:24:50 -0500 richgor@northwestern.edu (Rich Gordon) In December 2008, a class of Northwestern University journalism master's students -- including two Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winners -- unveiled a prototype news Web site called News Mixer. The site, one of the first to integrate Facebook Connect as a system for identity management, got a fair amount of attention for its novel approaches to user interaction around local news.

Almost two years later, another team of students from Northwestern's Medill School is hard at work in another "innovation project" class. Once again, the class focus is on local news and information. And once again the class includes Knight scholars -- this time, five of them. Geoffrey Hing, Steven Melendez, Andrew Paley, Shane Shifflett and Jesse Young are all in their fourth and final academic quarters. They will graduate in December, after the class completes its work.

While there are similarities between this class and the one two years ago, there are also quite a few differences. One is the number of students enrolled. News Mixer was developed by just six students; this year's class enrolls 15.

Another difference is the scope of the class's mission. In 2008, the charge to the students was relatively simple: as described in the class syllabus, "You'll develop ideas - and, we hope, software prototypes - that might improve the quality of news-based conversations and enhance civic engagement and 'social capital.' " This year's class has a broader focus, defined in part by a partnership with the Community News Matters grant program, which is providing financial support for the class. (Community News Matters is overseen by the Chicago Community Trust, which initiated the program as part of the Knight Community Information Challenge.)

Medill's commitment to the Chicago Community Trust was that we would identify an existing Web-based publication and, through a case study approach, recommend ways it can be more successful -- in understanding and serving an audience, in business and revenue strategy, in content and functionality. The overarching goal is not just to help one site, but rather to provide advice that would be applicable to other Web publications serving a geographically defined community.

The community where the class is working is none other than the home of Northwestern University: Evanston, Illinois. The site that's serving as our case study is Evanston Now, run by editor and publisher Bill Smith. While Evanston is hardly a typical community -- it's a college town, with a population that overall is more educated and more affluent than most -- it has some characteristics that make it an interesting place to explore the challenges and opportunities in hyperlocal Web publishing.

Evanston has a racially and ethnically diverse population (66% white, 19% African-American, 9% Latino and 7% Asian, according to the most recent U.S. Census estimates), a culture of civic engagement, a regular flow of news that sparks community interest and discussion, a commercial district with advertisers who might support a locally focused site, and in Evanston Now, a site with a professional manager who has an interesting background in journalism, marketing and technology.  Put simply, if a news site like Evanston Now can't build a substantial audience and a profitable business in a community with as much going for it as Evanston, what hope does a site without its advantages have?

In the first week of the class, the students attended the Block by Block Community News Summit in downtown Chicago -- an event that brought together hyperlocal publishers from all over the country to share what they have learned about running independent Web-based news and information sites. At the event, the students learned that local publishers are struggling to identify their audiences, build engagement with users and generate revenue to support their work. They also interviewed local publishers about their business strategies for a series of posts on the Block by Block blog.

In the past two weeks, the class has divided into three research teams:

• The audience team has been surveying and conducting in-depth interviews with Evanston residents to understand their interests in local news and information.
• The business and revenue team has studied the local advertising market, talked with local businesses about their needs, and explored alternative revenue models.
• The industry research team has talked with local Web publishers and brainstormed new ways to build engagement around local news and information.

The class's research will feed into a report that will provide advice to local publishers, including Bill Smith of Evanston Now, on how to build a more successful hyperlocal site. The research is also serving as a foundation for the technology development that the Knight scholars will lead in the remaining weeks of the course. Watch this space for periodic updates on the class's work -- and also check out the class blog at LocalFourth.com.

LocalFourth (the "fourth" is a reference to the press as the Fourth Estate) will publish a regular flow of posts between now and mid-December. A few highlights of what's been published so far:

• "Hyperlocal's Sustainability Problem," by Emily Dresslar;
• "From Zero to Personas: A Step-By-Step Process of Our Audience Research," by Jordan Turgeon;
• "Community Development: The Challenge of Building Integrated Teams for Local News Innovation," by Geoff Hing.

The Northwestern University team that Manya and Andrew are part of is focusing on young urban Hispanics and "how they are transforming American politics, media and education now and will continue to do so over the coming decades" said Steve Duke, director of Northwestern's project and associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism.

Gupta, Paley and their teammate Kennedy Elliott are developing the website for the Northwestern project. Paley is building the technical infrastructure and developing a "data wall" with information about Hispanic voting patterns, elected officials, population growth, educational attainment, and more. Gupta is developing graphics and interactive pieces for stories written by her and other News21 reporters.

Here are their reflections on the experience, which wraps up later this month

Describe your role in the Northwestern project

Gupta: As a true multimedia journalist, I am reporting and writing a media story, creating the introductory info graphic for the project, building data-driven Flash packages for two stories and helping in Web design and development of the Northwestern News21 website -- serving as media reporter and web developer.

Paley: Most of my work at News21 has been focused on database-driven, geolocation-specific visualizations that cover a wide array of datasets compiled from the Census, the American Community Survey, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and other sources. The idea is to supplement the team's reporting with a "data wall" that presents the user with a trove of pertinent information based on his/her location -- down as low as the county level whenever possible (when data's available at that level). Beyond that, my work here has also comprised web development, technical assistance on other members' projects, WordPress theme building, and server administration where necessary (in concert with Medill's IT department).

What have you gotten out of the experience?

Gupta: The fact that the Hispanic population is growing at a rapid rate is well-known. But during the course of reporting on my media story and working with other people on different stories, I have learned how the market, institutions and the American landscape are evolving to cater to this audience. I was always interested in web development and creating interactive graphics, but this was the first time that I attempted a data-driven infographic using the Adobe Creative Suite tools. I came up with a simple design and used colors strategically to represent multi-layered data in a clean, accessible format. I am thrilled to have received great feedback on it and have become a more confident designer.

Paley: I suppose the valuable piece of all of this for me has been the opportunity to continue to work with database-driven visualization techniques. A lot of what I'm doing now was informed by my prototyping of the American Visualizer project, though I'm now working with a different visualization library (based in Javascript instead of Flash).

Other thoughts?

Gupta: I think News21 is a great platform. It not only gave me an opportunity to use my technical and journalism skills in creating some wonderful news pieces, but also further proved to me that today's world of news has several opportunities for programmers like me, who can use their technical skills, learn journalistic skills and blend them all together to create news packages that are appropriate for today's audience.

Paley: It's been interesting to have the experience of working with a team of journalists outside the guided classroom environment. Our experiences in News21 have been largely self-directed on a day-to-day basis -- though the overall topic and focus was chosen by Medill -- and that self-direction has afforded us some room to experiment and collaborate in ways that we might not have had otherwise.

As we mark the end of Medill's spring quarter, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our largest cohort of Knight scholars ever: Geoffrey Hing, Steven Melendez, Shane Shifflett and Jesse Young. Including Manya Gupta and Andrew Paley, who enrolled before these four, we now have six programmer-journalist scholarship winners here at the same time. All six are accompanying me this week to the Future of News and Civic Media Conference on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Here each of the four gets a chance to answer a couple of questions.

Geoffrey Hing has a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from the Ohio State University. After graduating, he worked for an Internet service provider, the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project (which provides reading material to prison inmates), and the information technology department at Indiana University. He's also a musician whose band -- Defiance, Ohio -- is touring this summer.

Why journalism and why now?

Through my work with non-profits and grassroots organizations, I was always engaged around the news and information in my community.  I felt like many of the roadblocks towards solving community problems that became framed as ideological conflicts were, at their roots, a result of an information gap within the community.  People didn't understand what was happening, how government or institutions functioned, and the stories of different people with different orientations around community issues.  Journalism seemed like one of the fields best positioned to help meet the information needs of communities, and efforts such as the Knight Commission indicated that there was traction for framing the work of journalists beyond traditional news media.

I was also becoming frustrated with my role as a technology maker. I loved coding, but it was often an experience that was isolating from other people and from important things happening in the world.  Through networks such as the Allied Media Conference, I saw that there were exciting possibilities for using technology and technologically-mediated information to engage in the world, but I needed support to move in this direction.

What have you learned so far at Medill?

I've come to appreciate the difficulty in comprehensively reporting complex topics,  not to mention the time and resources that it takes. Personally, it's been really good for me to feel a stronger sense of responsibility for making sure that my understanding, and the understanding that I convey, is as true and complete as I can make it. The process of writing the news has made me realize that many of the things that frustrated me about the mainstream media were driven, not so much by bias, but the limitations of different media (inches in a newspaper, minutes in the nightly news) and making tough decisions about the kind of content that will help a media organization be economically sustainable. 

Steven Melendez majored in computer science at Harvard and worked after graduation for a litigation consulting firm, reading source code and writing reports in patent and copyright cases.

What have you learned so far at Medill?

I've certainly honed my writing. I've also improved my multimedia skills, which were pretty much nonexistent before I started here. I'd barely used a video camera and never done any audio or video editing. I'm not an expert in these fields now, and I probably never will be, but it's definitely nice to have some understanding of how things are done. I've also found myself reading newspaper and magazine articles more critically -- paying more attention to how they're arranged, who the reporters spoke to and what kind of information they've chosen to highlight.

What do you think are some interesting career opportunities for people who blend journalism and technology knowledge?

That's a good question, and I'm as curious as anyone about the answer. I think there's going to be tech-intensive work in migrating journalism to new platforms: smartphones, Kindles and iPads. It's harder for me to predict what the journalism-intensive work for people with technical know-how will be. More and more information is becoming available from the government and from the Internet at large, and there are certainly stories to be told if someone can extract them. Exactly how they'll do it and where they'll put what they write, I'll be curious to see.

Shane Shifflett graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City with a degree in computer science. He then worked for American Century Investments, programming voice-response systems and contact center software.

How did you get interested in journalism?

I've always had a strong interest in writing and telling stories.  Some of my favorite undergraduate classes were English classes.  I gravitated to videogame development because it was a medium where outrageous stories could be told.  So part of my interest comes simply from wanting to tell stories.  Given my interests, experiences and the state of the industry, I feel at home working towards ways to better serve the information needs of society.  On a personal level, it felt like the natural next step; a good way to blend my programming background with purposeful storytelling. 

What have you learned at Medill so far? How has the experience changed your outlook?

I'll spare everyone my soapbox, but since coming to Medill I've learned what incredible feats good journalists are capable of.  Being able to transmute ideas and express concepts in words concisely can be challenging.  To do so honestly and without bias is even harder.   To do it all on a deadline is ... well, it's a lot to ask for, to put it mildly.

I  have come to the realization that it takes a lot of work, and sometimes a lot of risk, to get a good story out.  The news industry isn't something that can be easily replaced by a cohort of bloggers and citizen journalists. A steady paycheck gives reporters the ability to do consistent, reliable work and not have to pander to their audience for approval.

Jesse Young earned his degree in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California-Berkeley. He worked as a developer and software engineer for MOG and Howcast

How did you get interested in journalism?

It was by pure chance that I came across information for the Knight scholarship through a blog post. I'm not convinced that journalism is dead, nor do I think the iPad is its savior. Now is an exciting time to be in this industry because we will eventually make sense of all this commotion.

What have you learned at Medill?

I've learned that Microsoft Word hasn't changed much since the last time I used it in high school. Though it doesn't crash as often as before, the grammar feature is still pretty broken. Somehow, this makes perfect sense because we've grown so accustomed to its interface that any changes would be anathema.

I think the print industry is a lot like Microsoft Word. It's so deeply rooted in tradition that any adjustments will have to be incremental lest it completely alienate its readers.

What do you think are some interesting career opportunities for people who blend journalism and technology knowledge?

So when my colleagues and I at the Medill School of Journalism were thinking about interesting data sets that we might make more useful for journalists, the Census was an obvious choice. It seemed like just the right focus for a new, experimental class focused on developing "tools for journalists" and enrolling a mix of journalism and computer science students.

The class -- "Collaborative Innovation in Media and Technology" -- just wrapped up last week, with five interdisciplinary student teams presenting prototypes of tools journalists could use to make Census data more valuable. All of the tools are interesting, and I will likely write more about them in the future, but for today, I want to highlight one of them: American Visualizer.

American Visualizer, now in a functional "alpha" form, is worth the attention because it was the most fully realized of the tools created in the class, and because it was developed by a team including Andrew Paley, the fifth "programmer-journalist" attending Medill on a Knight News Challenge scholarship program intended to bring skilled programmers and Web developers into journalism.

Andrew, along with journalism master's student Monica Orbe and computer science student Daniel Kim (and with guidance from Medill Prof. Owen Youngman and Northwestern computer science professors Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum) developed American Visualizer to make it easier to identify interesting stories from the Census.

The site uses information from American FactFinder, the online query tool developed by the Census Bureau to provide public access to its data. American FactFinder, though, is a "data labyrinth," the students said. And even if a user can find his or her way through the labyrinth, the data is delivered in tabular form. Rendering the data graphically -- often the best way to understand its significance -- requires importing the data into a spreadsheet or other software and then creating a graph.

"This tool instantaneously translates data into meaningful information -- from unintuitive and overwhelming collections of American FactFinder tables into immediate, concise and engaging visualizations," Andrew says. "And it does this on demand for whatever geographic region the user wishes.  It also allows for the comparison of two regional datasets."

In its current form, American Visualizer makes 10 different datasets available -- five for general visualizations and an additional five for comparison visualizations. Here are some suggestions for seeing its utility (best viewed with the latest version of the Firefox browser):

• From the opening screen, enter a city and state and a type of data you're interested in (housing, population by age, population by race, population by gender and population by level of education). Click "Create" to see a graph of this data. (Note: for a big city, the search results can be a bit slow, since at this point American Visualizer aggregates data from multiple zipcodes.)
• To see other types of visualizations, click on the "Advanced" button in the lower right. Here you can extract data for individual zip codes, compare cities to one another and compare zip codes as well. You can display the data based on raw numbers (for instance, the number of owner-occupied vs. rental units) or based on percentages of the whole. For the comparison of cities and zipcodes, there are additional data sets available: Labor force, mean commute time, median household income, and population below the poverty level.

Technical details: American Visualizer takes advantage of the Open Flash Chart open source visualization library.  Beyond that, the underlying architecture is built on standard and widely available LAMP stack server technologies--mainly PHP and MySQL.

Of course, since this is just an "alpha" release, there are many improvements and enhancements that Andrew and his team want to make: speedier query results; additional data types; user-generated customization of fonts, colors and layout; the ability to embed the visualizations, and a mobile app that would generate data based on the user's geolocation.

"Data alone can tell stories. The problem is that data-only stories can be hard to read," Andrew says. "But pictures, as the saying goes, are worth a thousand words."

This was the third interdisciplinary class Medill faculty members have co-taught with Hammond and Birnbaum -- and the first to focus on tools for journalists. These collaborative classes are conducted under the auspices of the Medill-McCormick Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism.

The first collaboration, last spring, served as a capstone class for the Medill master's students who participated. In that class, student teams created working prototypes of five products combining journalism and technology. One of them, dubbed "StatsMonkey," which writes baseball game stories from box scores and play-by-play information, has attracted a fair amount of attention. One of the team members who developed StatsMonkey was Nick Allen, one of the Knight "programmer-journalists." Asst. Prof. Jeremy Gilbert and I served as the Medill faculty for this class.

The second collaboration, taught by Gilbert, Hammond and Birnbaum, took place in the 2010 winter quarter and enrolled undergraduate students from the two schools. I haven't written about it here because none of the Knight scholars were involved.

Andrew enrolled at Medill last September and has one quarter of graduate study left at Medill, which he'll complete this fall. This summer, he will be working on News21, a multimedia reporting project involving journalism schools from around the country. (Also working on News21 will be Manya Gupta, the 4th Knight "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner.)

Among our scholarship winners, Andrew is somewhat unusual in that he actually studied journalism before -- as an undergraduate at Saint Michael's College in Vermont. Before coming to Medill, Andrew was a musician and a Web developer, most recently for LongTail Video, best known for its open-source media player.

Learn some more about Andrew in this Q&A:

Tell us about your background.

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and spent my childhood split between Madison, Wisconsin, and the hills around Burlington, Vermont.

After high school, I went off to Boston to study new media at Emerson College, but the program was in its infancy then -- and I was already becoming versed in web design/development -- so I switched gears/schools.

I ended up back in Vermont at Saint Michael's College, pursuing a journalism degree and a concentration in fine arts. While there, I co-founded, designed and helped launch the first online publication at the school and was a finalist in an international competition to re-imagine Internet browsers. I graduated in 2006, but I hadn't been on campus since 2004, finishing through a protracted series of independent studies that I arranged with key advisors.

My departure from the college campus was due to my other life in music. I spent most of 2004 through 2007 recording and touring the continent (and, eventually, Western Europe in 2009) with my band and through other projects. I continue to write, record and play with a couple of projects.

After many years of itinerant life, I settled temporarily in Brooklyn in 2008 and took a job as lead designer and web developer at LongTail Video. I'd been doing regular freelance and volunteer design/development work for a wide array of companies, bands, non-profits and politics-related entities throughout touring, and the timing worked out.

And then I came back to journalism.

How did you get interested in journalism?

I've always been a political junkie and a writer. It was a natural fit. After a few years away from it I came back because information is a powerful and potentially overwhelming thing, and I'd like to play some part in figuring out how to parse the glut of it growing online into something meaningful and useful. That's really going to be the key going forward -- not just information access, but information clarity and context. Beyond that, I think that the media has been failing us (and our local, national and global debates) for many years, and I'm hoping to be involved in changing that.

What do you think are some interesting career opportunities for people who blend journalism and technology knowledge?

There are all the (newly) traditional places that a tech-oriented person could show up in the newsroom: web producer, database spelunker, interactive designer, etc. But that's an incomplete portrait of the possibilities.

In the same way that creative development and information design have upended much of the old world media -- from Napster to to Bittorrent to YouTube to Twitter to hundreds of other innovations big and small -- I think news is next. And in many cases, the new media barons at the helm of all this innovation came out of literally nowhere. They were 20- and 30-somethings with big ideas and enough development prowess to get them done. That's where the real opportunity for tech-minded people who have a passion for news and information lies -- creative innovation (with both existing tools and those yet to be created).

News is ripe for this kind of directed reinvention, and I think it's already starting to happening with many of the open government and "sunlight" initiatives taking hold online (not to mention the ways those other innovations -- say, YouTube and Twitter -- have altered the way news happens). Pushing forward will require developers to build the new platforms and re-imagine existing ones and journalists to make them meaningful. I would imagine that those who will do this most effectively will be the ones who understand both journalism and technology.

Over the weekend of May 21-23, 80 journalists and technologists in San Francisco participated in the group's first "Hacks/Hackers Unite" gathering, where they developed 12 iPad applications. Meanwhile, our "question-and-answer" site, Help.Hackshackers.com, launched less than two months ago, is becoming a thriving online community for people interested in computer programming for journalism and media applications.

Here's the latest sign that Hacks and Hackers is meeting a need: the RSVP list for our first New York City event tomorrow night (June 2). There are now more than 160 people who've confirmed they plan to attend.

"I'm thrilled with the way this group seems to have hit on something right at the right time," said Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times, co-organizer of the meetup and one of three founders of Hacks and Hackers. (The other two are me and Burt Herman, a San Francisco-based technology entrepreneur and former Associated Press bureau chief and foreign correspondent.)

Burt did an amazing job leading the organization of the Hacks/Hackers Unite event in San Francisco focusing on iPad applications. The event was sponsored by KQED, National Public Radio, the Knight Digital Media Center, Demotix, Speck Products and Exygy.

At the end of two days of coding, judges picked two projects as the best applications:

• Citizen Kid News: an iPad app that provides a visually dynamic and accessible framework for kids to safely explore and interact with the news. Top kid-appealing news content is curated on a daily basis, in 5 categories: Animals, World, Science, Sports and Entertainment. A photographic touch interface provides a window into each story, and kids can select stories for further exploration that includes additional text, photos, video and audio. The app incorporates game mechanics to encourage participation: kids earn points for commenting on articles, viewing videos about the reporter's process, and eventually contributing their own articles. Kids earn badges along the way, starting with "Cub Reporter" and culminating with "Editor". Screenshots of the application can be found here and here and here.
• Who's Reppin' Me, a Web-based app that feeds users news stories about their political representatives based on location. Users can then send Tweets to lawmakers to express their approval or disapproval of their actions. The app is online at http://whosreppin.me/

A list of all the projects completed during the weekend is at: http://unite.hackshackers.com/2010/05/order-of-presentations/.
Video from the event can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/hackshackers. Matt Baume, on Poynter.org, did a nice writeup on lessons learned from Hacks/Hackers Unite.

The New York event tomorrow isn't going to try to tackle any technology problems - but it will be a great chance for hacks and hackers to get to know one another and talk about future collaborations. Burt, Aron and I will be there to talk about Hacks and Hackers. Jennifer 8. Lee, who has played a key role in organizing the event, will discuss her work with the Knight Foundation to support journalism innovation. Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google News, will also make some remarks. And folks from Patch, an event sponsor and AOL's hyperlocal startup, will be discussing their approach to news and technology, as well as the skills and experience they are looking for on their product and technology teams.

The event also gives me, Burt and Aron an excuse to get together in one place for the first time. We'll be talking about next steps for Hacks and Hackers. Feel free to post ideas and suggestions in the comments below.

When Aron Pilhofer and I proposed a "Hacks and Hackers" community -- for people doing software development relevant to journalism, its future or its role in society -- our idea was based on NICAR-L. But we wanted to use updated technology -- a Web-based community with good reputation-management features designed to encourage participation. Whenever we mentioned our idea to an experienced software developer, they'd say, "You mean, like Stack Overflow?"

Yes, in fact, that's just what we had in mind. And now it's more than just an idea -- it's a website called Help.HacksHackers.com. And it uses the same software that powers Stack Overflow, a thriving community for software developers. We hope you'll check it out.

We're launching in "bootstrap mode," which allows all registered users to post questions, post answers, comment, tag and rate questions and answers. Everything you do on the site is factored into the site's reputation management system, which lets you earn points/prestige by participating actively in the community.

For the past week or so, a few of our friends and colleagues have begun participating on the site, and you can see a sense of community beginning to emerge. We're seeing a nice mix of questions, some of them related to hard-core coding (tagging and structuring an XML document), some to more accessible topics (WordPress customization), and some to cosmic questions (what we should call a programmer-journalist). Aron, I and our "Hacks and Hackers" partner Burt Herman are administering the site, and we have Joe Germuska, Greg Linch, Brian Boyer and Chrys Wu as volunteer moderators.

We do have one little problem: The team behind Stack Overflow has just suspended Stack Exchange, their hosted service for other sites. This caused us a small amount of panic last week, but as we read about the company's plans, it seemed clear the goal was to keep thriving StackExchange-based communities up and running -- and without requiring them to pay for the service.

Currently, our site is guaranteed to stay up through July 13. On the Stack Exchange blog, the team writes: "Community is hard to build, and we want to work with you to preserve it if you've already done that with Stack Exchange." To keep this site up and running, it looks like the best approach is to demonstrate to the Stack Exchange team that we're meeting an important need and building a thriving community.

Please register at help.hackshackers.com, post a question, post an answer, or just rate some posts.